Purpose: Analyze the results of the Sports Car Club Autocross to understand who is competing and determine how car make, year, and course layout may have impacted performance.
Key Objectives:
What is Autocross?
The local Sports Car Club has granted us use of a dataset, with anonymized driver names, for this analysis. Autocross is an event where drivers navigate a course constructed from cones. Cars are categorized in classes set by the Sports Car Club of America. A quicker time is better than a slower time. Below is a photo of the JNaaP author driving the course.
Analysis Key Findings:
Dataframe successfully loaded! The dataframe shape is: (105, 6)
The first three rows of the dataframe are:
| Position | Class | CarID | Car | Raw Time | Driver | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | SMF | 141SMF | 1990 Honda Civic DX | 25.344 | Driver 1 |
| 1 | 2 | STU | 43STU | 2018 Honda Civic Type-R | 25.784 | Driver 2 |
| 2 | 3 | SMF | 41SMF | 1990 Honda Civic Si | 26.023 | Driver 3 |
After conducting some data preparation, the dataframe shape is now: (105, 10) The first three rows of the dataframe are:
| Position | Class | CarID | Car | Raw Time | Driver | Car Year | Car Make | Car Model | Car Model Type | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | SMF | 141SMF | 1990 Honda Civic DX | 25.344 | Driver 1 | 1990 | Honda | Civic | DX |
| 1 | 2 | STU | 43STU | 2018 Honda Civic Type-R | 25.784 | Driver 2 | 2018 | Honda | Civic | Type-R |
| 2 | 3 | SMF | 41SMF | 1990 Honda Civic Si | 26.023 | Driver 3 | 1990 | Honda | Civic | Si |
Event: Sports Car Club Autocross Total Number of Competitors: 105 Performance Overview: • Fastest time of the day: 25.344 seconds by Driver 1 • Slowest time of the day: 37.439 seconds • Average lap time: 28.914 seconds Car Overview: • Unique Car Manufacturers: 22 • Most common manufacturer: Honda • Most common car model: Civic • Fastest car of the day: 1990 Honda Civic DX driven by Driver 1 Class Overview: • Number of classes represented: 25 • Class that produced the top time: SMF
Average year of car: 2007.7 • Oldest car: 1971 • Newest car: 2021 • Most commonly occurring year: 2019
Fastest car of the day: 1990 Honda Civic DX driven by Driver 1
The field remains tight expect for the top 2 breaking into the 25 second range and
the bottom performers faring significantly worse.
Note that Hondas generally performed the best. Possible takeaways:
• Hondas are the best performing cars for this type of course.
• Honda drivers were generally more talented than the field.
• The course layout may have favored smaller cars.
• Or, a combination of the above factors contributed to Honda's success.
The correlation between performance and year is: -0.13013
This weak negative correlation implies we can expect minor improvements in
performance (lower raw time) as a car's age decreases.
POC: Kurt Klingensmith